1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to storage systems.
2. Related Art
Data today is commonly stored in a sub-network of shared storage devices, for example, magnetic or optical storage-based disks, tape drives and others. Typically, these storage devices are made available to computing systems (for example, servers) that are connected using computer network, for example, a local area network or a wide area network. Different types of servers may be used in existing systems. For example, a storage server, a special purpose processing system may be used for storing and retrieving data on behalf of one or more clients.
Typically, when a storage server receives requests (for example, read requests) from a client application, the storage server processes the requests on a first come, first serve basis. This results in accessing stored data in a random order.
Some client applications request numerous small files in a plurality of requests. Examples of such requests include requests from an anti-virus program for performing a virus check, requests from a back-up application to back-up data; requests for indexing stored files, and others. In conventional systems, the process of randomly accessing stored data in general, and numerous small files in particular, is inefficient because a storage device read head expends seek and rotate time to randomly access various small files scattered all over a storage media.
Therefore, there is a need for a better process and system for processing requests to access small files stored in a storage system.